The Sims 4: Wedding Stories offers great representation to its queer fans, but the DLC itself is frustrating to play.
There’s something to be said for the power of nostalgia. Many of us over a certain age have grown up with an appreciation for early video games that’s likely lost on the younger generation, and I feel that The Sims franchise is especially notable for this if you don’t identify as straight. The latest expansion pack ‘Wedding Stories’ offers a host of marriage ceremony-specific features, alongside placing a same-sex couple at the front of most of its advertising, and as a queer woman that’s grown up playing the franchise from its first base game, I was ecstatic. If your eyes started rolling at that, this piece probably isn’t for you – the Sims franchise is, of course, beloved outside of the LGBTQIA+ community, but it holds a special place for queer and curious kids who were able to explore their sexuality, and I’m not going to shy away from that. This isn’t to say that heterosexual people can’t also resonate with how the various editions of The Sims has grown with us as a society though, as I’m sure we can all share a collective outrage over base game features that were present in the original Sims released back in early 2000, slowly becoming paid-for content in DLC packs as the series has evolved (Hot tubs EA? Really?). It’s not all bad though – The Sims franchise has consistently provided great representation for the gay and bisexual community that was generally lacking elsewhere. While you couldn’t get ‘gay married’ in the original version of The Sims, the simulation game never prevented you from having same-sex couples or allowing them to move in with their partners. There were very few games that allowed that kind of interaction at the time, mostly being a handful of RPG titles where the sexual identities of NPCs are swept under the rug – for example, the male protagonist in Fable is able to romance and marry an NPC regardless of their gender, but while a union between him and a female character is treated legitimately, marrying a man is comedic and seen as ‘just a couple of blokes being blokes’.
